Questions About Killing Awlaki

Anwar al-Awlaki is dead, according to Administration officials. Does everyone feel safer? There are benefits, of course, to not having someone on the streets or hills of Yemen who wants to kill his fellow Americans—and Awlaki was an American, born in New Mexico. He was killed in a drone strike to his convoy, in an operation run by the C.I.A. and the Joint Special Operations Command. The A.P. reported that another American citizen, Samir Khan, was killed as well. Khan reportedly helped put out Al Qaeda’s English-language online magazine, Inspire. (A new issue was published last week.)

But there are a couple of points here that should make anyone wary: first, that the President of the United States could order the killing of an American citizen with no judicial proceedings, in a country (Yemen) with which we are not at war, simply because the President judges that person to be dangerous; and, second, the fuzziness used when discussing the exact nature of the danger Awlaki posed. According to the Times,

A senior administration official in Washington said the killing of Mr. Awlaki was important because he had become Al Qaeda’s greatest English-language propagandist and one of its top operational planners.

Was it as a conspirator or an inspirer that he was killed? The “senior Administration official” told the Times that his operational role was more important, and the A.P. noted that the Administration disclosed new “detailed intelligence to justify the killing of a U.S. citizen.” If so, it makes the extrajudicial nature of this operation more frustrating. And when one hears about Awlaki being linked to a dozen terror cases, the link in question is more often a sermon or an article or e-mails about jihad, rather than what might be called overt acts. (The Washington Post noted that he had been “been implicated in helping to motivate several attacks on U.S. soil.”) Would that have been enough?

This is not to underplay the hatred present in Awlaki’s words. But a bad man can inspire not only bad acts on the part of his followers but the embrace of a bad precedent by his enemies. (That’s us.) Reading about Awlaki—even approving of his death—one shouldn’t shut out the truth that one gets in murky territory when talking about the danger of someone’s words. Can the same logic be extended to a novelist who pops up on the reading list in some mass shooter’s online manifesto? When can a writer or a preacher—including one who claims, however genuinely, to have never intended for anyone to get hurt—be blamed when someone is? There may be enough in the Awlaki case to answer that question adequately. But it must be asked, in more than a perfunctory way, because it is hard to see what, in the Administration’s rationale, would prevent shooting an American dead in London without bothering with a trial. (And if the answer is that Awlaki had a funny name and didn’t dress like most Americans do—well, that suggests other, dangerous questions about who we think we are as a country.)

There is also the matter of drones, and our increased reliance on them. Was Samir Khan targeted because of his role on Inspire? Was there a directive to kill him, too, or was he just there? And who else was there? Jane Mayer has written about many of the questions raised by our reliance on drone strikes. They need to be asked here again.

If the debate about the death penalty in the past few weeks has shown anything, it should be that the bad nature of the executed is not the only thing that matters. So does the approach we take to execution, and the character and commitment to the law we show when we decide to kill someone. We have every right to interrogate those, no matter the frightening pictures and quotes from sermons we are shown. If we can kill Awlaki, in the way and for the reasons we have, whom else can we kill, and why?

Photograph by Muhammad ud-Deen/Creative Commons.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.